Friday, September 17, 2010

Good Classic Cartoon Repackaging

This is the way to present classic cartoons. Watching the Bugs Bunny Show on Saturday afternoons at 5 was the highlight of the week for me in the 1960s. These titles and wraparounds just made the whole experience more exciting.

27 comments:

I'm glad I grew up watching Warner Bros. cartoons since I was 2 on a black and white TV set, every afternoon after 4PM with hot chocolate and cookies. For a long time I was trying to figure out what colors I was watching until we got a decent TV... I was drawing and drawing what I saw.. That was a good life for a child!

I think you must have been one of the luckiest boys on earth back in the 1960s to actually be able to watch these classic cartoons with those awesome titles and wraparounds. These are always such a delight to watch. I feel sorry for all the youngsters growing up who aren't even going to know who Bugs Bunny is simply because the networks don't show such cartoons anymore. It's really chilling to think about.

I was a lucky animator. In Argentina in the sixties we used to make the sponsored comercial breaks of these show continuing with the characters of the precedent cartoon. The one I remember with more fondness was the commercial we made with Angelo The Flea.

In watching these again after all those years, I'm struck by how uncontrived and seemless the cartoons-in-between-the-cartoons are. A lot of thought and care went into the writing. The later TV specials are horrible, like the writers were completely out of ideas and interest in linking the cartoons together (the one with Bugs talking to flowers is downright offensive). Mel's unenergetic read in those doesn't help, either.

TV critics in the late '50s were already complaining about the ubiquitousness of old theatrical cartoons on TV (one reason that Huck was welcomed by them) so Warners had to dress them up with something new. These little bits are fun to watch and chock full of personality. It's a shame they were dumped later to make room for more commercials.

If I recall, John, I got to see the Bugs Bunny Show twice as the CBC aired it, then the ABC affiliate south of us did so later that evening.

Bugs is one of most influential hares ever to be invented. I believe, when Alan Alda worked on his "Hawkeye Pierce" character in M*A*S*H, he tried to imitate many aspects of Bugs' personality. He even referenced a lot to WB cartoons, watch the series.In the first two seasons or so, he called his colonel "Daffy Duck", when he was absent.

I had forgotten about that dog saying "Psst!" When I was a kid I thought that was the weirdest and, thus, one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. There was just something about a DOG going "Psst!" that was (and still is) hilarious.

I have a dumb question, but I really don't know the answer. Back in the 40's or 30's when they made animated cartoons for the theaters, or whatever, did they originally color all of them or did they just use different grays and black?

For the entire run of The Bugs Bunny Show, all you ever saw was the shorts Warner did not sell at fire sale prices to a.a.p. the TV syndicator. Later on, some of the massively awful shorts produced by Depatie-Freleng were added. This explains why you only saw a couple of shorts directed by Arthur Davis, and none by Clampett, or Avery, or Tashlin.

This is exactly what they should be doing now with all the Warner cartoons from the 30's to the end of their theatrical run (picking only a select few from their decline years), not that horrible show that's coming down the pike.

You should be helming the direction of the wraparounds/bumpers. Maybe Jerry Beck could help pick cartoons (so we just don't get What's Opera, Doc? and all the obvious stuff.

This would be the best-case senario for these cartoons.

John, I don't know how, but you really need to pitch a show like this. You're our only hope. And I mean this sincerely.

Along with the bumpers, one of the most impressive things about the original Bugs Bunny Show was the commercials. Other than a few minor glitches -- no ring-neck on Daffy in some of the Post ads (with Artie Davis directing, I believe), there was no cutting corners, and the animation work on the commercials is at the same level as both the linking segments and what was coming out theatrically at the time.

I'm lucky to have had a childhood that featured this show -- Saturday mornings in color. The opening sequence was simply Bugs and Daffy singing "This Is It", but man -- what an opener. I believe the 2000s internet term is "epic". What a way to package these classic cartoons.

Marty the short you are thinking of was a 1963 "cheater" which relied mostly on footage from a far better Freleng short of 11 years earlier. The new footage was pretty desperate, and even Mel Blanc did inferior re-recordings of lines from the original.

PS: The cartoon I remember was "Devil's Feud Cake," directed by Friz Freleng in 1962. It contains clips from "Hare Lift" (1952), "Sahara Hare" (1955), and "Roman Legion-Hare" (1955). It was produced as a cartoon short in its own right -- but it was a remake of a frame-story episode on "The Bugs Bunny Show." The original broadcast substituted "Hare Trimmed" for one of the other episode clips in the film version.

More likely Mel's lungs weren't into it, since the short was one of the ones done as Blanc was recovering from his 1961 auto accident. Most of his voices about this time sound weak and tired; they'd get better in the studio's final releases before the 1963 shutdown (and Mel sounds much better in the linking segments for the 30-minute version on "The Bugs Bunny Show").

Somehow the accident didn't affect Blanc's read on the HB characters he did at the same time (Deputy Droopalong, Barney Rubble and Mr. Spacely among them), but there's no question his readings on the Warner characters at that time lack bravado.